In Pursuit of Justice (32 page)

“Can’t hurt to see.”

Ten minutes later, Jason’s now-familiar voice rumbled from the speaker above the door. “Come on up. Might as well have a party.”

When they had ascended the elevator and disembarked on the third floor, they discovered Jason and Mitchell hunched over the monitors and murmuring conspiratorially. Rebecca regarded Mitchell impassively when the young officer turned at the sound of footsteps. Mitchell gazed back, a faint hint of challenge in her eyes. It was the first time Rebecca had ever seen her any way but appropriately respectful.

“Mitchell,” she said with a perfunctory nod.

“Sergeant,” Mitchell said stiffly.

Turning to Jason, Rebecca asked, “Anything?”

“The usual. Saturday night seems to bring out all the perverts. LongJohn hasn’t shown up, though.” Dividing his attention between the screen and the newest arrivals, he crossed one elegantly trousered leg over the other and asked, “How’s the warrant situation?”

“Captain Henry’s working on it. I should have something by show time.”

“Good,” he replied distractedly. “I’m not entirely certain that our guy will contact me tonight, since we already have a specified meeting for tomorrow. On the other hand, I want to be here if he does log on.”

Catherine nodded in agreement. “He may very well want to be sure that you’re still interested, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he sends a few more verbal tests in your direction—to verify your authenticity. He’s got to be suspicious that you—BigMac, I should say—might be law enforcement. I would suggest you appear enthusiastic but don’t probe too overtly for more information at this point.”

“Gotcha.” Jason reached to his right and thumbed through an inch-high pile of computer printouts. “These are from the last couple of days, and there might be some other possibles in here. We might as well take down as many of them as we can when the time comes.” Glancing then at Catherine, he asked apologetically, “Have you got a few minutes?”

Catherine hesitated, looking at Rebecca, who shrugged infinitesimally. By unspoken agreement, they had thus far kept their personal involvement private from the others in the group, for no other reason than that they both preferred to separate their professional and personal lives whenever possible.

“Sure,” Catherine said. “I’ll just take them back to the conference room and go through them.”

As Catherine lifted the pile and turned to leave, Rebecca looked pointedly at Mitchell and said, “Officer, let’s take a walk.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mitchell said and rose instantly.

The two of them headed toward the far end of the vast loft space, in the opposite direction from the conference room, finally stopping beneath an expanse of windows that afforded a view all the way into southern New Jersey. Between them and the industrial center of Camden ran the Delaware River, illuminated by the lights of oil barges and other ships.

“Captain Rodriguez called me this afternoon,” Rebecca began without preamble, referring to one of the uniform commanders and Mitchell’s superior. “He told me that all they need is your paperwork cleared up and you’ll be reassigned to street patrol.”

“I don’t want to be reassigned,” Mitchell said immediately. She was in jeans and a work shirt, but despite the casual garb, she stood at parade rest, as if she still wore her Army lieutenant’s bars.

“Is there some problem in-house?”

Mitchell glanced at her sideways, surprised by the question. It was rare for detectives to take any interest in uniformed officers, and rarer still for them to question the workings of other divisions. Frye was essentially asking her if she had a problem with her superiors or her fellow officers, which, to her knowledge, was unheard of.

“No, ma’am. No problems.”

“Okay.” Rebecca expected no other answer. Mitchell was clearly a by-the-book cop, and if she was having problems, she’d keep it to herself like any good cop and try to handle it on her own. Rebecca didn’t intend to push her on it, not now. They had other issues to get clear. “Then why don’t you want to go back to your regular duty?”

Mitchell squared her shoulders even further and said directly, “Because I want to stay on this assignment. I like working with Sloan and McBride…and I like working with you.”

Rebecca turned her head and regarded Mitchell steadily. “Every uniform wants the gold shield, at least any uniform worth anything at all.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’ve got a long ways to go before that, Mitchell.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But you’ve made a good start.” Rebecca slid her hands into her pockets and rocked slightly on the balls of her feet as she watched the night slide by on the river below. “I’ll see what I can do about keeping you around.”

“Thank you very much,” Mitchell said, trying not to sound as relieved as she felt. Frye was not the type you kissed up to.

“One more thing.”

Mitchell looked at her questioningly. “Yes, ma’am?”

“You want to tell me about you and Sandy Sullivan?”

Mitchell’s heart began to race. Suddenly, for the first time since the day she had stood on the parade ground at West Point as a new cadet, she felt her knees shaking. In a clear voice that she willed not to waver, she answered, “No, ma’am, I do not.”

“If you get between me and this investigation, or any other investigation, I’ll have your badge.”

“Understood.”

“Good,” Rebecca said. “We’ll meet here tomorrow afternoon at 4:00 p.m. to review the details of the operation.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mitchell said, hoping that the shock didn’t show in her voice. Frye had just invited her along on a high-level tactical maneuver. This was more than a dream come true; it was a career-making opportunity. And that was after her asking about Sandy. How in
hell
had she known?

“And Mitchell,” Rebecca added as if in afterthought, “don’t ever turn your back on the night. You never know who might be watching.”

*

For the next hour and a half, Jason and Mitchell occupied themselves inputting data into one of their seemingly endless analysis programs. Rebecca sat with her feet up on the counter, leaning back in a swivel chair, watching a computer monitor and thinking about Mitchell. After the third time she’d seen her in the Tenderloin late at night and out of uniform, she’d decided to find out what the rookie was up to. It hadn’t taken long. She’d followed them from the diner to Sandy’s apartment earlier in the week, and now she had to ask herself why she was allowing another cop to have anything to do with one of her confidential informants. Maybe it was the way she’d heard Sandy laugh at something Mitchell had murmured to her as they’d walked close together, their arms brushing with each step.

“Hey there, Detective,” Catherine said softly as her hand passed across the back of Rebecca’s neck.

“Hey.” Rebecca grinned, grateful for Catherine’s reappearance so that she didn’t have to analyze precisely
what
she’d felt when she’d seen the two young women together. “How’s it going?”

“I’ve pulled three that I think have promise. Officer Mitchell,” Catherine said, “I’ve circled the identifiers that I’d like you to cross-reference.”

“I’ll get on it right away.”

“Tomorrow will surely be soon enough,” Catherine said with a smile. Glancing at her watch, she added, “It’s nearly 11:30. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I need a break. Where’s Sloan, by the way? She seems to be the only one of us with any common sense.”

Jason laughed. “Don’t you believe it. She went to the airport to pick up Michael. If it hadn’t been for that, you can bet she’d be right here.”

“Ah,” Catherine said, still somewhat surprised. She would have thought Sloan was a lesbian, but perhaps that was just because she found her attractive. Smiling inwardly, she reminded herself that appearances were most often deceiving. “Well then, I’ll say good night.”

“I’ll walk you out,” Rebecca said, getting to her feet. “Jason—call me if anything comes up. Mitchell—go home.”

Both of them nodded, but they were already engrossed in some bit of electronic information, their heads bent close together over a printout. Neither of them said good night.

Michael Lassiter glanced at her passenger. “I could have taken the train from the airport, you know.”

Sloan reclined in the passenger seat, her left hand resting loosely in Michael’s right, their fingers intertwined. Smiling, she replied without opening her eyes. “I know that. I just wanted to be there when you came home.”

“I’m glad you were,” Michael said softly, her voice thick with a panoply of emotions—wonder, gratitude, desire. In all the years of her marriage to Nicholas, she had never felt this kind of welcome or the peaceful sense of well-being that came from knowing precisely where she belonged in the universe. “I love you.”

“Good thing,” Sloan said drowsily. “Because I’m mad about you.”

Michael had rarely seen Sloan exhausted, but she had known when she’d left for Boston that it was unlikely that her lover would sleep at all in her absence. From everything she had gathered, things were moving so quickly on the new investigation that even had she been in town, Sloan would probably have been working nearly twenty-four hours a day. It was only her quiet insistence that her lover get an occasional hour or two of sleep that ever brought Sloan upstairs during this kind of intensive assignment.

As Michael turned off the four-lane highway that ran along the river onto the maze of one-way streets in Old City, she stated emphatically, “When we get home, you’re going straight to bed.”

“Promise?” Sloan rejoined, turning her head on the headrest and finally opening her eyes. With a grin, life clearly returning to her features, she added, “I think you’re exactly what I need to jump-start my engine.”

“Well, you can just motor down, hotrod,” Michael said with a laugh. “Maybe in the morning I’ll take you for a ride.”

“I’ll be sure to pencil you in on my schedule, then.”

Michael was about to launch a comeback as she turned onto their block. Slowing, peering at the unexpected obstacle in her path, she muttered in frustration, “For God’s sake, who would leave that right in front of the driveway?”

Had Sloan been less tired, perhaps she would have been faster to make a connection. As Michael downshifted into park and opened the driver’s door to get out, Sloan glanced idly out her window toward their building. A shopping cart, turned over on its side, lay on the sidewalk in front of the wide double doors leading into their garage.
Odd
, she thought, as she dimly registered the sound of an engine starting nearby. Suddenly, some long-ingrained distrust pulsed through her brain. She turned just as Michael stepped from the car.

“Michael, no—”

Her words were lost in the sound of squealing tires, a muffled scream, and the rending of metal as the driver’s door of the Porsche was torn off and catapulted down the street. The Porsche then caromed sideways half onto the sidewalk from the force of the impact. By the time Sloan extricated herself from the car, which had been pushed into a parked minivan, the vehicle that had struck her lover was gone.

Ten feet away, Michael lay motionless in the road, a dark pool spreading on the pavement beneath her head.

*

“My God, did you hear that?” Catherine exclaimed as she and Rebecca stepped from the elevator.

“Sounds like a hell of a fender bender,” Rebecca muttered, instantly alert. “And it was awfully close.”

Suddenly, the sounds of frantic shouting were audible from just outside, and Rebecca hurriedly pushed through the door to the street. Directly in front of her at the foot of the steps, Sloan’s Porsche was canted onto the sidewalk with the engine still running. She glanced inside through a spiderweb of shattered safety glass. Empty. From the far side, she could hear strangled cries. “Catherine, stay here for a minute.”

“Rebecca, someone’s hurt. I’m a doctor,” Catherine said urgently from just behind her. “I need to attend to the victims.”

“I know that,” Rebecca snapped, not used to having her authority questioned at a scene. “But you’ll have to wait. I don’t know what happened here. It might not have been an accident, and I don’t want another victim.”
Especially not you.

There was no time for discussion, and the detective didn’t wait for a reply. Instead, she climbed over the rear bumper of the parked minivan—which now housed a portion of the front of Sloan’s abandoned vehicle—her cell phone in one hand and her weapon in the other. Even as she assessed the activity in the street, visually searching for possible assailants, she called for an ambulance and backup in clipped, commanding tones.